Tuesday, May 26, 2015

State charges alleged serial false rape accuser, but she disappears

An assistant attorney general for Montana says that 24-year-old Christina Nadine Nelson, formerly Christina Mark, made a string of alleged false accusations against three men between 2009 and 2012. A total of five medical rape exams were conducted on her, and she made two reports of assault. "Christina had a motive or pattern of accusing young men that she had dated of raping her and assaulting her when no such rape or assault had occurred," prosecutors have stated in court documents. At least one of the young men has been scarred for life.

Now, finally, she's being charged with felonies in connection with two of the allegations she made. Except there's a problem: authorities can't find her. Nelson did not appear for her initial appearance on May 21. She wasn't required to appear in person but by telephone. An assistant attorney general said Friday that Nelson’s whereabouts aren’t known, even by her own attorney. Nelson was supposed to appear last week in Yellowstone County as well but didn’t show. An assistant attorney general fears she might be in Europe.

How was this woman permitted to leave the country?

The incidents we know about are disturbing. Read on.

2009 PROM

In 2009, when Nelson was a German high school foreign exchange student studying in the United States, she said she was raped and cut with a knife by her date on the way to their prom. But detectives found inconsistencies with her statements. An investigation found she suffered no cuts on the night of her prom. When detectives asked if there was blood on her prom dress from the cuts, Nelson told them there was blood but she had washed it off.

Despite the inconsistencies, the boy Nelson accused was charged by police and expelled from school and was not allowed to return to campus. "He moved out of state because he felt that his reputation was destroyed by Christina's allegations," according to court documents filed by the prosecution. A month after the prom, Nelson stated she wanted to drop the charges against her date, and the charges were dropped, too late to spare the young man from the scars of an apparent false rape claim.

AUGUST 2012

On August 10, 2012, Nelson told police that she was leaving her job at Planned Parenthood at about 5:30 p.m. when a former boyfriend approached her in the parking area. She said she told him she was married now and to go away. She alleged that he became violent. He supposedly slapped her in the face and punched her in the stomach nine times--presumably she was carefully counting. Then he took her to a vehicle where he raped her. After the supposed rape, Nelson joined friends at a downtown brewery for a drink and she got home about 7 p.m. She then went to a gym with her husband to work out. After showering, they sat in a sauna and hot tub. They returned home and had unprotected sex. Then she told her husband about the alleged rape at about 10 p.m., and he took her to a clinic.

A detective spoke to the former boyfriend, who met Nelson at Rocky Mountain College and dated her from November 2009 to about June 2011. The man proved he was in Seattle from Aug. 9 through Aug. 18. He had receipts and photos to back up his account. Surveillance video from Nelson’s workplace showed her and a co-worker getting into their vehicles and driving away and no sign of the former boyfriend or his vehicle. (Thankfully, rape victims no longer require corroborative evidence, but in too many cases, now men and boys accused of rape need corroborative evidence to be cleared.) A detective reported having trouble re-contacting Nelson until she sent an e-mail on Aug. 29 saying she didn’t want to press charges.

TWO OTHER 2012 REPORTS

In two April 2012 reports, Nelson had reported to law enforcement that she had been assaulted at her residence in Billings, although the SANE reports indicated that Nelson reported the rapes had occurred in dorm rooms at Rocky Mountain College. Law enforcement further learned that in April 2012, Nelson reported that the same former boyfriend she accused in August 2012 supposedly raped her.

________________

This site has chronicled the news reports of many serial false rape accusers--see here.

False rape accusers are rarely treated as serious criminals. The sexual grievance industry has made a concerted effort to have police and prosecution stop charging false rape accusers because they assume that prosecuting false rape accusers somehow puts off rape victims from reporting or takes away from the effort to prosecute rapists, as if it were a zero sum game. Some claim that prosecuting false rape accusers violates women's human rights.

Aside from the inexcusable injustice to the men and boys whose lives are damaged or destroyed by a false rape accusation, failing to treat false accusers as serious criminals does no favors for rape victims. Every rape lie diminishes the perceived integrity of every rape accuser. The public loathes both rape and rape lies, and when the public perceives that false accusers are permitted to lie with impunity, it undermines confidence in the way rape is handled. As a result, juries are all the more reluctant to find even guilt in rape cases even when it may be deserved.

Society has made innumerable efforts in the past few years to get women to report their rapes, often at the expense of the due process rights of the men and boys accused. False accusers take advantage of these efforts. A few years ago, a woman arrested for falsely crying "rape" had the audacity to borrow a meme of the sexual grievance industry and proclaim, "That's why women don't report rape."